Today we headed north up into the Daintree National Park, the lands of the Kuku Yalanji people. We acknowledge the Kuku Yalanji elders past, present and still to come. It was wonderful to know that the Eastern Kuku Yalanji people took formal ownership of the Daintree National Park two years ago, and now manage it in partnership with the Queensland Government.
Today was always going to be tricky. We initially looked at a couple of day tours up into the Daintree National Park, but so many of the reviews said you spent so much time in the bus, and not a lot of time walking around. So when I looked at the driving distances, we decided that we should just self-drive it – and that way we could stay as long or as little at different places as we liked, depending on what the kids were enjoying. But it was still planned around a very long day – arriving at Mossman Gorge early, and probably getting back home close to sunset.
Things were then made a little more complicated because we needed to take Estelle (our VW Tiguan) over to the Volkswagen service centre in Cairns to get the front-facing camera calibrated after the windscreen was replaced. Unfortunately, with the timing for that not really being negotiable, that put us a little behind for the day.
We arrived at the Mossman Gorge centre and had a brief look around. I had thought there was more in the centre other than just a gift shop and a cafe – but no, that was all. We grabbed our shuttle bus tickets for the trip into the ‘Gorge and headed outside to luckily catch the shuttle bus that was waiting there ready to go. (There’s no parking up at the actual Mossman Gorge, and so catching the shuttle bus is really your only option.) We headed along the beautiful tracks that they have through the area to several different lookout points, and to the fun suspension bridge across Rex Creek. It was fairly busy, and there was a decent sized tour group there at the same time as us – but there were still moments of being able to just enjoy the tranquility of the area. There’s a much longer 2.5km track around the area, which we would’ve loved to also walk if we had the time.
The next stop was to cross over the Daintree River on the car ferry – the only cable ferry in tropical Australia apparently! Thankfully, traffic wasn’t too busy, and so we were able to get straight onto the ferry and across. And once you’re across, you really feel like you’re in the oldest rainforest in the world – you’re immediately surrounded by thick, dense bush, along a narrow and winding road. It was stunning!
We headed straight up to Cape Tribulation – although there was a few other things we could’ve done along the way, we really wanted to get all the way up there to do a couple of walks while we knew we had the time. We went straight to the Kulki Boardwalk (Kulki is what the Yalanji people actually call the whole Cape Tribulation area), which I knew would be a stunning walk up to a lookout over Cape Tribulation, the Coral Sea and Myall Beach. What I didn’t realise is that you can actually walk down onto Myall Beach and see some of the incredible mangroves that live at the edge of the beach and the Coral Sea. It was quite magical.
We then headed back down the Cape Tribulation Rd a little way to a boardwalk called Madja. We really enjoyed this one – there was actually far less people around than most other places we went to all day. The walk took us very quickly from the rainforest down to the edge of the Noah Creek, and most of the walk was actually up above the swampy edges, with plenty of mangroves around. There was a really nice amount of signs along the walk telling us about different plants and animals native to this area – including a few plants that are literally only found within a radius of perhaps 50km from Cape Tribulation.
From there, unfortunately it was basically time to head back home. We had to be back at the VW service centre before 5pm – and in reality, there was a lot of driving between where we were and where we needed to be. It was really sad to miss out on a couple of things we’d been keen to do: Daintree Ice Cream, and also the Daintree Discovery Centre.
Like I said at the top, doing this trip as a day trip really requires you to be up in the Daintree early, and be prepared to be getting back to Cairns at closer to 6pm. Even more ideally, you actually do it over a couple of days! There’s always going to be things we wished we’d done a little differently on this trip – but I’m still glad we are able to say that we visited and experienced the beauty of the oldest rainforest in the world. It just gives us a reason to come back to this whole Cairns area one day really soon and explore it all again with more time.
